Kurilskoye Lake, Kamchatka (23 August): Bears. More Bears.

23 August 2014

Kurilskoye Lake, Kamchatka, Russia

Wee bears. Between blows.

Okay, now it's time to get down to bear business. Kurilskoye is the second biggest lake in Kamchatka. It and the surrounding nature preserve serve as a beacon to 3000 bears, a significant proportion of which have been massacring salmon at a stunning rate at our nearby stream. We awoke this morning to brilliant weather and a marvelous breakfast perched on the edge of the Earth. Here is how Liam described today:

Kurilskoye Lake. Baby bears in natural state of
buffeting each other. Made me feel less of a
failure as a parent.

Liam’s Blog: At 10:00 we go on a hike. It is going to be a 2-hour hike. But we stop like 50 times for bears and getting on our waders. Waders are rubber boots with rubber leggings attached. So it takes 3 hours to get to our destination. There are like millions of salmon in shallow water because we are here during spawning season. As I said we saw a lot of bears so that means we saw a lot of salmon carcasses on the path so it smelled like a dump the whole time. We have lunch and have a lot of fun at the destination. I take my waders off because they’re kind of hot and they rub together when I’m walking and sound weird. I’m too lazy to get on my waders back on so I build a bridge to a little rock island where everyone else is. Carrie, Grace and Dad brought their iPhones and their waterproof cases so they tie their cases with their iPhones in them to a stick and take underwater footage.

We start heading back to the camp and stop for 10 minutes because of some lazy bears eating fish near us. When they leave we continue on and when we are ¾’s of the way back my feet are really sore. 

A bear can have a personal relationship with his diet.

Predator, prey and scavenger

Constantine at work. Hopefully this photo of her 3 children and her
mother won't make Anita too nervous!

What does Kamchatka bear watching expedition look like? There are several novel features. First, we travel in a tightly packed line in a specific order: ranger, interpreter, children, women, men and then ranger. In this case, father of three comes in between children and women. How masculine. The rangers are both armed, so it looks like we’re advancing through the brush under armed guard. Constantine, our lead ranger and grandfather of a 10 year-old Russian boy who is how come with us, is a model of ranger bravado – etched features, wrap-around sun glasses, camo outfit down to his camo do-rag – and ranger perception. He is tremendously aware of bears in thickets to our left and right and will halt the group at an apparently innocuous thicket from which emerges a brown bear several minutes later. The whole experience makes me mindful of how much of nature I pass blithely on my paths.

Gracie & waders

Gracie’s Blog: The ranger and (our guide) Alona tried to find spots where we didn’t have to wade, but if we had to wade I thought it was fun. And I thought we should wade every time we got the chance, but the ranger’s grandson, Vova, didn’t have any waders so he had to be carried. Anyway, the walk was really fun and every time we saw a bear we HAD to stop and take pictures. And it took about 5 minutes to be done taking videos and pictures and stuff like that.  By the time we got to the fiftieth bear I was kind of tired of them and wondered what a squirrel looked like. We even saw a bear in a tree and the ranger had to shoe him out. Most of the bears were trying to fatten up because winter was coming. They were catching salmon in the river we were walking along. There were a lot of ripped-up salmon bodies on the path that the bear only took one bite out of. I thought it was GROSS! There was also something else. I’ll give you a hint it’s something that people do all the time: POO. Anyway, the walk seems like a pretty long walk, but to me it seemed like it was just 15 minutes.

More Bears. During spawning season at Kurilskoye bears are the new squirrels in so far as they’re ubiquitous to the point of becoming banal. Regular bears. Huge bears. Bear cubs. Mother bears with bear cubs. I’ve been told again and again mother bears with bear cubs are the most dangerous. We’ve seen 5 to 10 – one cub, a couple cubs, three cubs. Small cubs, medium sized cubs. Cubs baffing each other. Cubs practicing fishing. Cubs complaining that mom needs to get them fish. Mom’s fishing. Mom’s eating. Mom’s ignoring their cubs. Mom’s complaining that cubs aren’t sharing. And that’s just the moms. At first you’re excited to see bears. Then you’re excited to see more bears only if they’re particularly close. By the end of the trip we’d become so inured to bears that we only really stopped if they were doing something interesting like reading a newspaper. Well that’s not entirely true, but its close.

Liam's narrative wouldn't be complete without a description of how you chill out after a bear expedition. Liam's Blog: When we get back I let my feet rest for a little. Then we go “swimming” in the freezing cold lake. We go to a pumice beach and the first thing Dad does is take off his clothes, except for his bathing suit, and dives in. Brr. I throw Carrie’s favorite piece of pumice really far into the water so Gracie goes and gets it because it floats. We stay there a bit longer and then go back to dinner.

What he didn't mention is that this is the only swimming expedition we've ever been on that required an armed ranger to guard us!

So today while we were hiking my mind got beared out. My thoughts slid to the places we had visited, and what it meant to visit a place. As I waded streams and stumbled upon unexpected bears I realized that the more I visited places the less I understood about what it meant to visit a place. What does it mean to have visited nine countries en route from tip to tundra? We have transected, and in some places we have even wandered. We have exchanged money, struggled with currency and exchange rates. We have been ripped off by cab drivers – have we ever. We have made selections in grocery stores. But China – even Laos – is far bigger than we have tried on.

Blueberry fields forever.